This invention relates to reorganizing content in an electronic document.
Businesses and individuals that publish electronic documents—web pages, email, Microsoft Word documents, rich text files, for example—usually have a target platform in mind. Often the platform is a desktop computer with reasonable storage capacity, memory, bandwidth, and a reasonably large display. Because the electronic documents to be published are designed with this platform in mind, they often contain complex formatting information involving tables, frames, graphics, and navigational aids, all of which define how the document is to be rendered on a conventional computer monitor.
A user may wish to access such a document through a medium for which the document was not originally designed, for example, an Internet-enabled mobile phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), or a handheld computer. These devices have limited screen size, resolution, and rendering capabilities and are typically unable to render such documents as they were originally designed. Internet-enabled mobile phones, for instance, usually can display only a few lines of text, and either grayscale, thumbnail-sized images or no images at all.
A different medium, which presents similar issues, is speech. People may access electronic documents by telephone, by dialing in to a service that uses speech synthesis to dictate the contents of the documents over the phone. Voice Becoming the ‘most powerful tool’ on the Web, Barbara Rose, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 29, 2001. A dictated document does not express the complex layout information embedded in the original document.
Many Internet-enabled mobile devices restrict the maximum size of a document that they can render. For instance, most Internet-enabled phones that comply with the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) standard support documents no larger than 2000 bytes. Even for those mobile devices (e.g., Pocket PC's and palm-based computers) that do not impose a strict size limit on documents, large source documents must be broken into smaller parts because transmitting long documents at once over slow wireless networks can try the patience of users. (For a similar reason, large documents are broken into smaller parts for the purposes of dictation.)
For example, the original hypertext markup language (HTML) of the web page shown in FIG. 1A can be broken into nine subdocuments so that the page can be displayed in subdocuments on the screen of a phone as shown in FIG. 1B. The top of the screen on the phone shows “(2/9)”, indicating that the phone is displaying the second of nine subdocuments that made up the original HTML document.